This Forum seems to have missed the announcement from Intel. Having queered the pitch of the original project with their untimely injection of the 'Classmate', slated at twice the intended target price, they now drop the project because it isn't sufficiently profitable. It was never intended to be profitable!.
Intel epitomises all that is nasty and greedy about American capitalism. Those of us who've been around since the 8088 know just what an appalling company is this one. Nothing they have done has been bathed in glory. Lousy products at inflated prices. Too many recalls and a cavalier attitude to their shareholders who have borne the cost of their trail of mistakes. The x86 series was never a winner, but that's another story, and may be, like the ill-conceived, ill-gotten M$DOS, a consequence of the unseemly haste of IBM back in '81.
Best plan, when BK visits their Indian subsidiary, would be to stuff his Classmate freebies into an orifice that makes maximum global headlines. For the rest of us, boycott is probably the most effective response?Last edited by Sage on Sat 05 Jan 2008, 05:30; edited 1 time in total

according to http://www.golem.de/0801/56801.html Intel was forced by the olpc-Chief Nicholas Negroponte to stop selling the classmate-PCs, because they would be a concurrence to the olpc.
So he requests that Intel stops selling its own solution to please AMD, so that AMD can get all the benefits (=Money).
Ehm, that is a bit naive, isn't it?

The thirld world is a market of course.
No company can act for reasons of pure humanity.
They need to earn money.
So it is just legitimate, that Intel tries to sell these classmate-PCs.

Might sound a bit hard, but that is just "normal capitalism", business as usual.
I do not see that as problematic as for example selling radiactive milk-powder to southern america, as it was done by german companies (or was it the government?) shortly after Tschernobyl in the 80ies.

Interesting - not the way the BBC is telling the story. Intel is awash with cash, despite its appalling history. They could easily give away a billion machines. OLPC started out as a university project, anyway.

AMD has had a chequered history, too, but their business model and research aims have been more transparent and more equitable over the years, if less immediately successful at certain times. And, of course, every consumer 64-bit Intel cpu has AMD 32-bit translation code embedded because that was yet another problem Intel failed to solve, just like the P4 heat-dissipation, 90micron-shrink, ....PII-slot1....370socket....486 recall fiasco....286.....8086. Boycott is the only answer to goons like this. And we didn't get round to the TI chips! VIA ITX is a better way forward?

Altruism, enlightened self-interest, always pays long term dividends, but these American (and European?!) capitalists are too dim, too greedy to see the big picture.
Same issue with bird flu - if the West doesn't send limitless bundles of cash to places like Vietnam and parts of China where it can originate and breed - we all die!!!
Indeed, if every Asian smallholder were paid €1m to stop keeping pigs and poultry in the same yard, the world might be able to halt the relentless mutation of the common cold virus and recoupe the initial outlay several times over within a decade through savings in lost productivity, quite apart from alleviating the human misery.
Crushing short-sighted, short-termism global capitalism should be the goal of every decent mortal on this planet. That doesn't preclude honest clods from earning their daily crust in return for products and services.

Are we referring to the same news, "Intel drops out of One Laptop Per Child program"? See for example
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN0326574120080104

Shouldn't your title be "Intel R.I.P." (from OLPC, that is).

As noted in other blogs, this is still the Intel side of the news. It could be useful to wait until OLPC makes an announcement._________________Puppy user since Oct 2004. Want FreeOffice? Get the sfs (English only).

I consider this good news.
The OLPC already has a working laptop, using a AMD processor.

Intel has been so busy working along with Microsoft in the past 15 years, tweaking the same processor to make it a little faster, rather than thinking of doing something new... so the only "innovation" seems to have come from AMD and IBM (the Cell processor -- the reason Sony Playstations are used for supercomputers!).

When the OLPC laptop was ready, Intel suddenly panicked and wanted in -- so they joined and suddenly there's development of a OLPC laptop with an Intel processor. What for? If you finish building a house and suddenly some contractor comes and suggests you rebuild it using him, will you start over, or just go on and move into your house?
And what if the Intel-based OLPC laptop were to be completed -- has anyone got doubts that they would have tried to kill the AMD-based version?

I say good riddance._________________What's the ugliest part of your body?
Some say your nose
Some say your toes
But I think it's your mind

Another interesting tidbit:
Intel were supposed to display the prototype of their version of the XO laptop next week. Now that they've retired, it's been scrapped.
That seemed like an interesting coincidence, which made me thing maybe Intel was unable to create anything as good as AMD...

Now this:
http://charbax.com/2008/01/04/intel-diamondville-and-menlow-processors-not-low-costpower-enough/_________________What's the ugliest part of your body?
Some say your nose
Some say your toes
But I think it's your mind

The best in low-power processor for x86 is so far the AMD Geode. The article points this out, and it's something I've told Intel execs here last year, and they had no answer.

Sad to say, the XO is felt by many to be slow, so it must be the software that is slowing it down. Puppy Linux runs happily in the processor abandoned by OLPC, the GX466. Now OLPC uses the LX700. See the GX466 at work.

Puppy Linux and the AMD Geode are like lovers who still have to eyeball (to use current slang ) in a rendezvouz called "laptop".

Now, it's a coincidence that one of the more aggressive developers of low-power hardware is in Dougal's backyard, Compulab.

Expect Quanta or any of its spin-offs to market an XO mutant soon. However, Intel is seeing success of its eeePC, and many geeks were convinced that it is THE low-cost laptop.

Luckily for Puppy, mdd is donating an XO to Barry:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=22607&start=15

EDIT: typo of "Sad", was "Say"._________________Puppy user since Oct 2004. Want FreeOffice? Get the sfs (English only).Last edited by raffy on Mon 07 Jan 2008, 01:00; edited 1 time in total

well not to skew the topic or anything but a friend of mine bought one of those nokia n800 internet tablets running a modified debian if i remember correctly ... it has a TI arm chip with DSPs to help with some heavy lifting... i was really impressed with the device it has very good battery life (even overclocked to 400mhz from 330mhz...he wanted to compile faster ) i think that the next gen arm processors (which is what is in the olpc right?) would make quite decent PCs (assuming the DSPs are fully supported)_________________Taking Puppy Linux to the limit of perfection. meanwhile try "puppy pfix=duct_tape" kernel parem eater.
X86: Sager NP6110 3630QM 16GB ram, Tyan Thunder 2 2x 300Mhz
Sun: SS2 , LX , SS5 , SS10 , SS20 ,Ultra 1, Ultra 10 , T2000
Mac: Platinum Plus, SE/30

The 'geode' marque is not new. AMD started to use the series for smc cpu about a decade (?) ago.
As for 'i' , they are, as Dougal indicates part of the DWintel cartel. Everything to do with $$$, not much to do with customers. The only approach that people like this understand is a worldwide boycott. And that is going to be an extremely hard nut to crack in view of the extensive brainwashing prevalent in their homeland. It's going to take personal intervention by better-informed, smarter folk like those visiting this Forum.

I agree, I don't care if the Classmate is better than the OLPC (which in a technological innovative sense I doubt anyway) I wouldn't take one if they were giving them away. Because... I think Intel's behaviour and motivation for producing the Classmate is a disgrace. They have tons of money and could easily have truly helped the OLPC project instead of trying to bully it out of the market.

As Dougal says, good riddance to Intel. And yes, they have a lot to answer for. Their stupid processors have been hopeless in terms of memory models and their crappy design meant their has been no easy/efficient way to virtualise them (vmware had to go through horrible hoops to get round the issues).

I do hope someone manages to get Puppy Linux running on the XO soon. I'd particularly like to see someone getting Sugar to run on top of a Puppy base on the machine; I imagine it would run much faster on a slim puppy than on the bloat likely produced by Redhat.

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot vote in polls in this forumYou cannot attach files in this forumYou can download files in this forum